Dawn of War 2

While Relic’s staying mum when it comes to the game’s multiplayer element, the campaign structure is already in place. The first game’s campaign was quite linear; each expansion added on a more abstract strategic layer, allowing players to fight over continents and regions of a planetary surface, but it still seemed like a tacked on way to make the campaigns more ‘interactive’.

DoW2’s campaign is much vaster in scope, which also ties back into Relic’s efforts to make your squads and units cherished comrades rather than disposable grunts.

Your Marines start play aboard an Imperial battleship, which has been tasked to clean up this as yet un-named sector. However, the order in which you approach the missions, sub-missions and planets is very open. Once you approach a planet, you can respond to any number of distress calls from the surface, and then drop your troops into action. In the demo, there were three such distress calls, each with a different style of mission – and mission reward. More on that later.



However, you only have a limited time to complete each mission, so the order in which you take on each challenge will limit what else you can do. Do you drop into an urban combat zone to take out a rampaging Ork warboss, or do you reinforce Marine colleagues beleaguered by an overwhelming attack? How this kind of semi-branching mission structure will hook into the larger plot remains to be seen, but it was hinted that there’ll be far more than one ending. “There’s a difference between winning and having three citizens and a dog left, and winning and having most of the sector intact,” says Mark.

As we said, each mission offers up unique rewards – epic weapons and wargear with which you can customise your characters and squads. In a move that shares more than a few similarities with the MMO scene, random wargear will even drop from certain badguys as you slice, shoot or annihilate them. “We’ve taken the library of the 40k universe and really ramped it up,” Jonny says. “Items come from mission completion, as well as dropping on the battlefield. It’s all about creating a one-more-minute gameplay experience,” adds Noseworthy. In the next section of the demo we saw a Marine Commander, with a warhammer bigger than God, smashing five kinds of shit out of a warboss, and we believe every word the devs have to say about customising your troops.